Errata-ebookk Day 5 The influence and shining view of my childhood friend Eve is never far away. Various memory clusters of her pursue me. They unexpectedly appear and overpower senses of the moment, replacing the present with versions and memories of her, seemingly never an end to each succeeding recall. She was a few grades beyond me and, though the other older kids were interested in their youngers only for the sake of ridicule, Eve often needed to stay back and rest. No one (especially teachers and parents) spoke to her as if addressing a child, if at all, but instead like she were in her last days, bed-ridden in a convalescent home. The effect of this must have aged her, not in chronological years, but in a timeline of weightiness. I suspect her need for continual rest was intensified by this weight she must’ve carried around, outsized upon her slight frame. She surmised the immoderation of a fellow bookworm a few houses away, intuited that I was a mutual non-participator insatiable for the written word, and of the type to eventually go on immoderately rather than talking in tiptoe. She wasn’t carefree in the way of most children, because she was born with a weak heart, which required four surgeries by the time she graduated from high school. Eve was rarely publicly maudlin about this, and never showed elevated consternation. Despite my fool’s crush on her, Eve, pretty with dark curly hair and of a captivating speculative spirit, was essentially the big sister I never had, crucial at amending and maneuvering me through my parent’s limited scope and the impairing effect of coming of age in a city with a pinched cast of mind. As if it’d been a considered intervention all along, she was the one who pruned my green sapling of budding irrelevance and exposed me to aesthetic concerns, to films, music, and literature, always literature, never with pretension (for she prostrated her knowledge). My parents considered her influence the audacity of pagans, though her politics especially riled them, seeing Eve as plotting to hinder and squash the involuntary morals they believed were bred in me. Eve is responsible for my either/or question bedrock, Raymond, do you want to look back on your life and think, at least I watched a lot of television? She was no striver by any means and felt that most accomplishments were hollow, but neither was she a nihilist or regressive, more a champion of hard-fought individualism. She emphasized that the options were not bland maturity or a continuous immaturity. There was another way. We started to grow apart around the time that my forced extra-curricular activities of band, track, cross country, church youth group, and a part-time fast food restaurant job left little free time for visiting (this marked a shift in my position from being mentored to following the stirrings of self-guided seeking, resulting in an eventual deeper unity between us despite a descent in our ongoing friendship at the time), but I knew she’d gotten an after-school job at the neighborhood library branch and pictured her there, occasionally appearing aloof but only tired, recommending titles and authors in her sweet understated but critically convincing way. Down the line, when I returned from college, our friendship was rekindled and it was clear that she was interested in no more than the platonic connection as before. Eve’s congenital condition was critical enough that she was born into a life of limitations, needing more rest than her grandparents and not expecting to outlive them, but when she left this world, it wasn’t with a weak mind, and any of us can do well to say the same. There was always an end to Eve, and perhaps that admittedly gruesome poetic quality heightens her memory, of a baby born with a defective organ. I often feel like it’ll take me at least 20 years from now to reach age 30, and as my own time seems elongated, it’s unfortunate that additional years weren’t granted to Eve, extending her heart a meager few years longer, allowing her wide-eyed expression when flipping through a new book and cradling it lovingly to remain in this world and infect it a few years longer. I don’t have the generosity of spirit to be Eve, in fact her memory is rebuking, but since I know that she considered purgatory any place without pages, the only act I can perform in her name to pay tribute is live the reader’s life, and with all my wishing facilities, imagine her content in a house of books.
